Category Archives: courses

Our team has assembled a playlist that contains the fall 2013 course materials that have been developed on H2O by professors from Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Boston College, and Boston University. You can find that list of materials at < http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/playlists/2062 >. If you are also teaching materials developed on H2O this fall, let us know so that we may add your materials to the list!

We’re very excited indeed to note that Professor Pam Karlan of Stanford Law School has made the first installment of her Fall 2013 Torts class materials on H2O; those materials are available at < http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/playlists/1995 >. Professor Karlan has added and selected an array of edited cases (some adapted from edits by other H2O users, such as Professor Jonathan Zittrain, and others she edited from scratch). Professor Karlan has also added many new introductions, and has included numerous links to videos and other external sources (see, for instance, her collection of materials for “An Introduction to Torts“.)

Students in Professor Cohen’s course may make their own version (“remix” in H2O’s parlance) of the edited cases, and then add their own highlights and annotations (after deciding whether to set their version to public or private), which will be maintained in the print version (if the students decide to print their versions).

Other professors may adopt and adapt some or all of Professor Cohen’s casebook on H2O under the site’s CC-BY-NC-SA license (per the Terms of Service). As Professor Cohen notes in his “Acknowledgements”:

“I undertook this project in the summer of 2013 with the hope of helping students avoid the high costs of textbooks, generating content that could be used and improved upon by others, and tailoring my materials to my own needs. I hope you will enjoy and disseminate it widely. …”

Associate Professor Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., of Boston College Law School, has developed a set of materials on H2O that are slated to be used for part of his fall 2013 “Church and State” Seminar. You can read — and create your own remix — of Professor Kalscheur’s materials here: < http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/playlists/132… >. The materials are arranged around topics such as “Introduction and History,” “Free Exercise of Religion in the Regulatory State,” and “Religious Displays and Religion in the Curriculum.”

We’re very excited to note that Brian JM Quinn, an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School who is visiting at Boston University School of Law this fall, has created “Corporations – A Virtual Casebook” on H2O. You can read — as well as remix your own version of — the casebook here: http://h2o.law.harvard.edu/playlists/116….

Learning American law requires reading a lot of cases. And cases can be long — sometimes really long.

Traditional casebooks typically include only excerpts of most of their cases. A casebook’s editors decide what parts of each case should be included in the book and, as a consequence, they also decide which parts of each case will not be shown. Students interested in reading the whole case have to track down a full version elsewhere.

One of the tools H2O provides professors is the ability to show or hide portions of a text while maintaining the ability to read the hidden parts of the text by clicking on an elision box.

We plan to present H2O during the lightning talks at the Annotations@Harvard Convergence Workshop in the Radcliffe Gymnasium on March 28th. The event’s organizers have lined up a great collection of projects involving annotations.

H2O allows users to provide in-line annotations in collages. Professor Zittrain, for instance, added a few explanatory notes and definitions in U.S. v. Carroll Towing Co. in his spring 2013 Torts playlist.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The decision is already available in H2O. Compared to print casebooks, H2O allows professors to update their teaching materials at a much faster clip — indeed, as quickly as those materials can be ingested into H2O.